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Best Groupware Application

Lotus Notes Is The Groupware Leader

The groupware market is getting more crowded. Products offering forms, workflow, discussion groups and document-sharing functions are redefining the features and benefits of organization-wide collaboration environments.
Despite the raft of new challengers to the throne, Lotus Notes still gets our Well-Connected Award. Notes can handle more networking situations, more client and server platforms, and offers replication both between servers and to clients as necessary. Gone is the OS/2 server requirement that slowed acceptance in many organizations; now Notes can run on NetWare, NT, Unix and OS/2 server platforms. Notes also functions well in a wide variety of networking and operating system environments, fitting in rather than forcing changes on the existing world.
A Notes forum can handle a variety of object types, including messages, documents and forms. Connections between Notes and a variety of external SQL data sources are available now, as well as fax and e-mail gateways.
Notes is becoming a rich information networking environment, a strategic platform on which to base enterprisewide internal applications as well as services. Published APIs make Notes accessible by the corporate developer. With its wide third-party support, Notes has been successful long enough that there are now experts able to assist any organization getting started. While the cost of Notes implementations remains higher than some other groupware products, Lotus has cut some of its price with the new Notes Express.
OpenMind packs many of Notes' featur es into an approachable system, but it lacks programmer and platform support. Collabra Share runs over the e-mail infrastructure without forcing the organization to implement new application infrastructure for conferencing, but it doesn't have the pedigree of Notes.

Lotus Notes, $275, Lotus Development Corp., 55 Cambridge Pkwy., Cambridge, MA 02142. (617) 577-8500; fax (617) 693-0968.

Runners-Up
OpenMind, Attachmate Corp.,
3617 131 Ave. S.E., Bellevue, WA 98006. (800) 426-6283;
(206) 644-4010; fax (206) 747-9924.

Collabra Share, Collabra Software, 1091 N. Shoreline Blvd.,
Mountain View, CA 94043.
(800) 474-7427; (415) 940-6400;
fax (415) 940-6440.